Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 20:40:48 -0700
From: Bennett Haselton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: study: censorware companies use double standard
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Peacefire conducted an experiment to see if blocking software companies
would hold all Web sites to the same standard in determining what to block.
What we found was that, in every case, the company will block certain
content hosted on a personal home page, but will not block *identical*
content on the home page of large, well-funded organizations with lawyers
and PR departments and rented Congresspersons leased in their name.
(Surprise.)
Explanation: Most of the censorware companies have a blocking category for
"hate speech" sites, which, according to definitions published on the Web
sites of the companies, usually include something along the lines of
"discrimination or denigration based on race, gender, national origin, and
sexual orientation".
Obviously many Web pages of religious conservative organizations contain
statements that "denigrate" gay people based on "sexual orientation". But
we assumed that most censorware companies would never block these sites
even if the anti-gay quotes were pointed out to them, so Peacefire
conducted an experiment, "Project Bait And Switch":
http://www.peacefire.org/BaitAndSwitch/
Peacefire collected some of the anti-gay quotes from the home pages of the
Family Research Council (FRC.org), Concerned Women for America (cwfa.org),
Focus on the Family (family.org) and Dr. Laura (drlaura.com) and put these
quotes on "bait" Web pages which were set up on free home page sites, with
each "bait" page corresponding to one of the original religious
conservative sites, except that attributions for the quotes had been
removed. For example: "All Americans should shudder when homosexual
activists routinely use the tactics of threats, intimidation, blackmail and
deception to strangle a free and open exchange on homosexual behavior,"
from Family.org. We then submitted these sites (using anonymous HotMail
accounts) to the review staff at SurfWatch, Cyber Patrol, Net Nanny, Bess,
SmartFilter and WebSENSE.
All of them took the bait; almost all of them blocked all four of the
anti-gay "bait" pages (WebSENSE blocked only three of them, and SmartFilter
blocked two). At
http://www.peacefire.org/BaitAndSwitch/
we have links to the archives of all correspondence with the censorware
companies, showing that they agreed to block the "bait" pages as "hate
sites", since they obviously met their criteria for "denigrating people
based on sexual orientation". (We also have links to attributions for the
anti-gay quotes, showing where they came from on the corresponding "real"
organizations' home pages.)
Once we told the companies what we did, all of them started backpedaling
and refused to block the original sites that were the source of the quotes.
Of course, we do not advocate censoring these pages from students, but
only because we are against Internet censorship in general. If blocking
software companies are going to block anything, these sites do meet their
criteria.
So, the censorware companies may have avoided a short-term disaster by not
blocking the home pages of the large, right-wing groups that traditionally
support them. But in the long term, we think this incident will come back
to haunt the censorware companies, since it serves as evidence that the
companies are using a double standard for organizations that have money.
-Bennett
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